"This is a discussion that *has* to take place on two differentlevels. One is the purely empirical where saying "there is a God" and"There is no God" are both statements of nonsense devoid of realmeaning because they both claim to describe some aspect of reality yetno test can be devised (again short of dying) that can falsify eitherof them."

Once again, your knowledge of logic is faulty. The attempt in logic,debate or science is not to "falsify" or disprove anything; the goal isto PROVE something. Repeat after me: you cannot prove a negative. Theburden of proof of any statement belongs with the person making theassertion, NOT the person receiving it to disprove it. You are simplymisstating how science and logic work in order to make a debating pointthat doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

"Without a transcendent God imposing a transcendent morality upon manthere is no basis for rights save the state. Without a source of rightand wrong that exists outside of the human race there is no basis,except for fickle human opinion, to say that Mother Teresa is betterthan Adolf Hitler."

Another debating trick that also doesn't hold up to close inspection.

The notion of a monotheistic god -- *GOD* -- is fairly recent in humanterms. The Greeks managed to build an entire civilization that wasknown for its arts, its philosophy, its advancement in all areas(military included) using a host of household and minor deities whowere in NO way ANY kind of guide to what was right and wrong; half ofthem were capricious and just plain nuts, the the other half were offmating with human women and then writing off their kids.

Yes, in time Greece fell. But so did Rome, the spearhead(figuratively and literally) for Christian propagation worldwide in itsearly history, so I wouldn't necessarily throw *that* into the mix.

Very, very, very few people decide not to murder because God wouldn'tlike it. They don't murder (assuming they choose that) because they'reafraid of being apprehended and sentenced under the laws made by humansin order to facilitate cooperation and progress and safety. (Ifanything, people have proped up the notion of god as rationale formurder for centuries on all sides of the theological coin.)

I'm not saying that religion is per se bad, it's like any other humanartifact, including technology, it's what humans make of it. But atthe same time it's self-indulgent in the extreme for folks who believeto write off the whole of human history and say that if it weren't fortheir particular deity, we wouldn't know right from wrong, or positivefrom negative, that we'd just be staggering around blindly...when thenotion of that sort of god is extremely recent in human consciousness,and prior to then we did okay; not perfect, we had wars and bloodshedand the like...and we still do. Most of it by believers in one thingor another.

When was the last time you heard of an atheist car bombing an embassybecause he thought it would bring him closer to the void? When was thelast time you heard of an atheist murdering his entire family becausehe *didn't* hear the voice of god talking in his head? When was thelast time you heard of an atheist declaring a crusade or a jihad or apogrom? (And don't even try to bring the old soviet union into this;that was a political madness that had less to do with belief systemsand more to do with the accumulation of personal power at the expenseof EVERYthing, that wouldn't allow for ANY divergence from what theyconsidered the norm.)

You can write off "fickle human opinion" all you want, but from whereI sit we haven't done too badly, all things considered.

If my tone seems to imply I took some small offense...the operativeword is "small," because I'm used to this. On the one hand, I prettymuch don't have a problem with anything anybody believes so long asnobody's hurt by it. On the other, religionists tend to mutter darklythat if it weren't for some god-inspired notion of right and wrong, ifwe don't have that, well, we're just anchorless, as prone to murder achild as give somebody a gift. That it's all caprice.

Well, I happen to be an atheist, and I *can* tell the differencebetween Mother Theresa and Hitler. And your inference that one can'tis simply wrong and condescending. As an atheist, I view every life as*incredibly* valuable because we only get one turn around the merry goround, and then it's over; no backsies, no second chances, no heavenlychoir to sing one into the pearly gates no matter how terrible orabusive a life one's led as long as at the end one chooses to Believe. Every life is rarer than the rarest diamond, and since the only futurewe have is that which we make, the only signs we were here are thatwhich we create, life must be preserved, nourished and given the chanceto grow.

Because those Greeks -- you remember, the ones who didn't believe inyour particular god, with its rules for right and wrong -- actually hadthe audacity to once define happiness. Not in terms of right andwrong, but in even larger terms. I noted them at Macon. To wit: "Theexercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affordingthem scope." It's about the only creed I live by.

Not bad. Bet they could even figure out this whole MotherTheresa/Hitler thing, too....